Pat Conroy on Losing.

Pat Conroy, lower left

There is no downside to winning. It feels forever fabulous. But there is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss. The great secret of athletics is that you can learn more from losing than winning. No coach can afford to preach such a doctrine, but our losing season served as both model and template of how a life can go wrong and fall apart in even the most inconceivable places.

   Losing prepares you for the heartbreak, setback, and tragedy that you will encounter in the world more than winning ever can. By licking your wounds you learn how to avoid getting wounded the next time. The American military learned more by its defeat in South Vietnam than it did in all the victories ever fought under the Stars and Stripes. Loss invites reflection and reformulating and a change of strategies. Loss hurts and bleeds and aches. Loss is always ready to call out your name in the night. Loss follows you home and taunts you at the breakfast table, follows you to work in the morning. You have to make accommodations and broker deals to soften the rabbit punches that loss brings to your daily life. You have to take the word "loser" and add it to your resume and walk around with it on your name tag as it hand-feeds you your own shit in dosages too large for even great beasts to swallow. The word "loser" follows you, bird-dogs you, sniff you out of whatever fields you  hide in because you have to face things clearly and you cannot turn away from what is true. My team won eight games and lost seventeen... losers by any measure.
--Pat Conroy, in My Losing Season.

Pat Conroy on words.

    Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language. Words lifted me up and filled me with pleasure. I’ve never met a word I was afraid of, just ones that left me indifferent or that I knew I wouldn’t ever put to use. When reading a book, I’ll encounter words that please me, goad me into action, make me want to sing a song. I dislike pretentious words, those highfalutin ones with a trust fund and an Ivy League education. Often they were stillborn in the minds of academics, critics, scientists. They have a tendency to flash their warning lights in the middle of a good sentence. In literary criticism my eye has fallen on such gelatinous piles as “antonomasia,” “litotes,” or “enallage.” 
     I’ve no idea what those words mean nor how to pronounce them nor any desire to look them up. But whenever I read I’ll encounter forgotten words that come back to me like old friends who’ve returned from long voyages to bring me news of the world. Often, I’ll begin my writing day by reading those words in the notebooks I keep with such haphazard consistency. Though I’m an erratic journal keeper, I admire the art form well enough to wish I’d had the discipline to master that sideshow of the writer’s craft. I lose most of the world around me when I fail to record entries in those notebooks that line my shelves.
     I could build a castle from the words I steal from books I cherish. Here’s a list I culled from a book I read long ago—“sanction,” “outlaw,” “suburbia,” “lamentations,” “corolla,” “debris,” and “periodic table.” I can shake that fistful of words and jump-start a sentence that could send me on my way toward a new book. But if I go forward a single page I can listen to a different reading self who cherry-picked words from another book and recorded “atlas,” “villainy,” “candelabra,” “tango.” Each file of words seems outfitted for a different story or novel. I hunt down words that have my initials branded on their flanks. If I take the time to write one down I want to get it right every time I form a sentence. I’ve known dozens of writers who fear the pitfalls and fastnesses of the language they write in and the glossy mess of the humanity they describe. Yes, humanity is a mess and it takes the immensity of a coiled and supple language to do it justice. Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself. I’ve amassed a stockpile of books in vaults and storage bins in attics and unfinished basements and tortoiseshell-colored boxes that I raid with willful abandon when I try to fix a sentence on a page. Words call out my name when I need them to make something worthy out of language.

—from My Reading Life

Pat Conroy on Writing, Reading and Story

"Safety is a crime writers should never commit unless they are after tenure or praise. A novelist must wrestle with all mysteries and strangeness of life itself, and anyone who does not wish to accept that grand, bone-chilling commission should write book reviews, editorials, or health-insurance policies instead. The idea of a novel should stir your blood, and you should rise to it like a lion lifting up at the smell of impala. It should be instinctual, incurable, unanswerable, and a calling, not a choice."

"My mother promised that reading would make me smart, and I found myself recruited in Mom’s battle over her own lack of a higher education. She distributed books to me as though they were communion wafers or the tongues of fire that lit up the souls of the disciples with Pentecostal clairvoyance. Mom would point her finger to a wall of books and tell me she was showing me the way out of a shame that was unutterable. I took whatever book she put into my hand and made it part of me. I made it the life of me, the essence of my own tree of knowledge. With each book, I built a city out of what my heart loved, my soul yearned for, and my eyes desired."

"The most powerful words in English are 'tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself."
—from My Reading Life, by Pat Conroy

My Writing Bucket List

Writers of the world, if you’ve got a story, I want to hear it. I promise it will follow me to my last breath. My soul will dance with pleasure, and it’ll change the quality of all my waking hours. You will hearten me and brace me up for the hard days as they enter my life on the prowl. I reach for a story to save my own life. Always. It clears the way for me and makes me resistant to all the false promises signified by the ring of power. In every great story, I encounter a head-on collision with self and imagination. --Pat  Conroy, My Reading Life.

   Thanks, Pat. I will do my best. Although I don't think it will be a novel.
   That was (and still mostly is) always my wish. Much of that desire I do owe to Mr. Conroy, whose novels always inspire me, despite his being, in his own words, "showy with adjectives" and "overreliant on adverbs." Though I sometimes feel his lengthy and florid novels are death by a thousand paper cuts, it is nevertheless a sweet death. I can appreciate them all the more because I have been trying to write a novel for over six years. I have close to 80,000 words towards a story that is going nowhere currently, even in my mind. My characters are thoroughly unruly and disobedient, and the story arc has bent so tight I fear that like an overtorqued steel spring it may break and kill me.
   So, I have decided to look at other venues for writing. I have crafted a bucket list of writing goals I want to accomplish before I die (or my novel slays my ambition). My goal in each case is to have them published in some reputable (and perhaps even financially renumerative) fashion. Here they are:

   1. Write a short story. I do believe I can write a 5,000 to 10,000 word story that would be worth reading, although a shorter one would be harder. In fact, I like the notion of a story collection, where all the stories have a connection, probably implicit (five people who picked up a pack of hotel matches in 1968 Scottsdale, Arizona, for example).

   2. Publish a poem. It is true that "prose is words in their best order, poetry is the best words in the best order." While Eliot's The Wasteland doesn't bring to mind economy, it most certainly is. Of all the written arts, poetry comes closest to both painting and music, where in both you can be as realistic or as impressionist as you dare. Poetry slams sometimes have the same effect as strolling through a museum. Reading poetry aloud is just like listening to live music—there is joy in the silence between notes, and the decaying echo from the back wall. My poetry (two examples here and here) tends to be on the realistic side, but who knows? I would love to see my words in The Atlantic, or The New Yorker, but I must realistically think more towards regional poetry magazines and reviews.

   3.Publish an essay. I love researching. I love interviewing. I simply love observing. Put those three passions to pen and paper and I think an essay would probably be my best shot for my first publication. I have in mind a story from my home town about a supposedly true story of a grave that may, or may not, contain the person named on the tombstone. It's full of politics, family love and hillbilly justice.

   4. Write a song. In my late teens and early twenties I played guitar constantly, and wrote a few songs that I would perform at weddings or just for friends. I still remember a couple of them, and they were decent enough. And while I am becoming accustomed again to the guitar after a three decade estrangement, I think I could write a meaningful, appealing lyric and place it in a competent piece of music. My personal tastes lean towards singer-songwriters, like James Taylor and Jackson Browne, or contemporary songsmiths such as Pierce Pettis, Jason Mraz or Patty Griffin. I fear some of my production may even fall into the "country" category, but it's a hot market. I prefer the term "Americana," the songs of people and places and hopes and dreams. If I can ship off two or three songs a year to publishers, maybe one will find an ear.

   5. Write a screenplay. This fascinates me. And the only thing that encourages me in this venture is that I have seen many TV episodes and movies where I have been able to anticipate the next line, or the next scene, with uncanny accuracy. And there are times when I have obviously had an idea that I am sure would have worked better that what ended up in the script. I would probably feel most comfortable with drama; maybe some short morality tale, that ties up in the end with a few threads still loose.

   6. Write a novel. Again, it's a wish more than an obsession at present. I feel like the fellow who has sketched his dream home on the back of a napkin, and who knows how to use a hammer and a saw. The rest seems daunting to me.

   7. Write my obituary. I can almost assure myself that this might actually find itself published, if there are any local newspapers left.